A couple weeks after the season was over, after his Rockets had pushed the “unbeatable” Golden State Warriors to the brink of elimination — a 3-2 series edge and double digit leads in the second half of Game 6 and Game 7 — Mike D’Antoni was ready to start the season.

“Let’s run it back,” the Rockets head coach said before he got on a plane to head home to West Virginia for some much-needed, but hardly desired, rest and relaxation.

With as close as the Rockets came to winning it all, D’Antoni didn’t want to let that team go, but he knew that team was gone.

And like every game, every season, every team, is different.

“Things change,” D’Antoni said, unintentionally, I think, in the same tone of Don Ameche’s character from the movie of that name.

As we get close to the biggest change in the Rockets’ offseason becoming a reality — 48 hours after the Atlanta Hawks buy out Carmelo Anthony’s contract he will be eligible to sign with the Rockets, and he will do just that — the question of whether it will work has intensified.

There is no way that Anthony as a Rocket can work, they say.

No way. No how. No chance.

Anthony is a one-way player who isn’t the scorer he once was but doesn’t yet recognize it, who wants his shots more than he wants to win, who is accustomed to being the No. 1 option, who refuses to come off the bench, who tangled with D’Antoni when the latter was his head coach in New York.

There is some truth, some fiction, some as-yet-to-be-determined there.

One funny thing about the question of whether Anthony as a Rocket will work, is the biggest doubters, those most assured that it will fail, are the ones who doubt for the sake of doubt.

D’Antonio gets a chuckle

You don’t hear a lot of amens from the congregation if you say all is well.

D’Antoni laughed at what the doubters were going to say before he knew two key members of his rotation, Trevor Ariza and Luc Mbah a Moute, would leave the team to sign elsewhere.

He all but chuckled at the doubters again Saturday in a visit to the Texans’ training camp in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., where D’Antoni and his wife, Laurel, live in the offseason.

“It’s our job to prove them wrong,” D’Antoni said. “And we did it for two years now.”

When the Rockets hired D’Antoni and announced that he was moving James Harden to point guard, the doubters had a field day.

They said there was no way moving the league’s second-leading scorer to point guard would work.

The Rockets had the second-best offense in the NBA and won 14 more games than they did the previous season.

Last year at this time, after the Rockets traded for point guard Chris Paul, the doubters ran wild again.

They said there is only one ball, so there was no way two players, who like to handle it as much as Harden and Paul, could co-exist, let along flourish.

All the Rockets did was win an NBA-best 65 games, posting a 44-4 record in games in which Harden and Paul started together.

Add Anthony to the Rockets during last year’s playoff run — drop him in around Game 6 of the conference finals — and they would have beaten the Warriors and gone on to win a title.

Could be difference maker

Instead, the Rockets go to sleep counting the bricks on a loop from their 0-for-27 stretch of 3-pointers in Game 7.

What the Rockets needed most at that time is what Anthony has always done best. Houston scored just 89 points a game in the consecutive losses. Anthony for a couple games could have been the difference maker.

But that isn’t how the world works.

For all practical purposes, when the Anthony signing is completed, Rockets general manager Daryl Morey will have traded Ariza and Mbah a Moute for Anthony and James Ennis.

While the doubters might be over-the-top in condemnation of the impending signing of Anthony, can he and Ennis replace what the Rockets lost in a pair of outstanding leaders, who were proven wing defenders and could make shots on occasion, is a legitimate question.

Anthony has been an all-everything player, but he is 34, entering his 16th season and coming off the worst year of his career. Ennis has shown as much or more than Ariza and Mbah a Moute had through the same point in their NBA careers, but at 27 how much growth potential does he have?

“If we’re going to beat Golden State — which everybody is searching for — you’ve got to take some chances and you’ve got to hope that things hit out and hit that sweet spot,” D’Antoni said Saturday. “Doesn’t mean it will happen. But I’m confident and I love our guys.

“And I think the worst we’re going to be is great, and hopefully we can take that last step.”

Great wasn’t quite good enough last year.

With the addition of DeMarcus Cousins, it is possible the Warriors have become more unbeatable than they were when the Rockets almost beat them. Or they could be more beatable.

Things change.

The Rockets are betting that their changes will end up being for the better.

Jerome grew up in downtown Acres Homes, Texas. He is a proud graduate of Mabel B. Wesley Elementary and was a basketball team captain at Waltrip High School, where he helped the Mighty Rams to a near-.500 record.

A math genius and engineering major in college, he's still working on this writing thing. He says that the three years he spent as an F.M. Black Panther probably played a more significant a role in the man he would become than the time he spent in college.

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